As much as we might want to avoid dealings and responsibilities, especially when they are imposed from outside, and when they are competing with other interests. But it is often in those times when distracted and least expect anything of good to come out of the added tasks, that something truly enlightening emerges.
While doing readings that I thought would be repetitive, and working on a draft grant application (one that I didn't feel at all ready and capable of tackling), I ended up with two ways of interpreting my research topic that really excite me. It may not be that I'll end up using either in my final work, but the fact that I can see my interests in many areas is exciting and pedagogically helpful. For example, Habermas' theory of public spheres can be applied to my interest in visual representations of dying. Particularly in media photographs of dying in contemporary high-resource and highly medicalized countries, the images can be understood as fully part of the public realm despite the fact that they are of experiences that would, by today's cultural norms, be a very private event. Habermas' concept of the public sphere is inherently political - the realm of public opinion. These images I refer to are purely political: normalizing discussions of dying/death; raising awareness of universal palliative care; and bringing attention to the dying with dignity movement. Comparing these images to ones of images of individuals dying in low-resource settings, the sense of the political shifted for me. Certainly, the images of people dying of AIDS, or famine, or even violent deaths, are political, and become part of the public sphere - the realm of public opinion. The difference is that the former images are of photos who (ostensibly) want their deaths to be recorded to raise awareness of a political issue. The latter images on the other hand, more often than not, are of individuals who have not participated in the experience of their photography to any great degree. Certainly, there is the theory that people are so accustomed to photography that they 'implicitly' consent, with the expectation that the photos will be used to support their political ends, but when someone is dying, are they really thinking that? Is this not a great assumption to make when someone is experiencing something so utterly and essentially private as dying? Though the press may be laudably using the photos to draw attention to disparities in global health care or to political issues of famine, but do the ends justify the means? Perhaps my next entry will be about the deontological and utilitarian approaches of these two types of photographs…I also need to develop a better term for these differently purposed types of images. For a later
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